A metamorphic testing approach for online testing of service-oriented software applications

Testing the correctness of services assures the functional quality of service-oriented applications. A service-oriented application may bind dynamically to its supportive services. For the same service interface, the supportive services may behave differently. A service may also need to realize a business strategy, like best pricing, relative to the behavior of its counterparts and the dynamic market situations. Many existing works ignore these issues to address the problem of identifying failures from test results. This article proposes a metamorphic approach for online services testing. The off-line testing determines a set of successful test cases to construct their corresponding follow-up test cases for the online testing. These test cases will be executed by metamorphic services that encapsulate the services under test as well as the implementations of metamorphic relations. Thus, any failure revealed by the metamorphic testing approach will be due to the failures in the online testing mode. An experiment is included